Month: May 2009

Celebrate 15 years of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender PRIDE in the Philippines, join the anniversary Pride Parade in Baguio City.

Come together on June 28, 2009 – meeting place at the Session Road @ 8:00 a.m. – supported by Metropolitan Community Churches in the Philippines and Progay Philippines. Please bring your rainbow flags and your straight family member.

The whole event will be from June 22-28, 2009.

Activities will be Pride parade, sports festival, Pride LGBT Mass and Film festival

This has been a long overdue post because the Lesbian Parenting forum I attended was last April 18. Even though it’s already been a month, it still deserves a spot here in my blog because I believe that it is one of the issues some lesbians here in the Philippines face.

What makes a family? It is not just a biological concept anymore, in fact it has evolved into a social construct. We sometimes consider long time colleagues at work as our family. The rigidity of the family as a biological concept sometimes become the root of bigotry and homophobia. The common notion is that our biological family can do no harm on us; thus the saying goes “blood is thicker than water”. BUT, this is not always the case as there are biological family members of ours that abuse us and show insincerity in their actions towards us. All we need to do is to widen our minds in the concept of the family.

Lesbian Families in the Philippines. We may deny it or not but there are already lesbian families here in the Philippines. Whether they were planned (like undergoing artificial methods of pregnancy) or the woman had a child before engaging in a lesbian relationship. Whatever the grassroots were, it is already in our status quo. There are many issues that lesbian families in the Philippines face because primarily, we do not have a law that legitimizes lesbian partners taking custody of children in case something happens to the partner. Under the Philippine Family Code, a child that is born out of wedlock is considered illegitimate. Thus a lesbian couple’s child is illegitimate and has to be with the biological mother’s custody. We do not have same sex unions in the Philippines and so the problem arises when lesbian couples decide to have their own children. A lot of couples, who have the capacity to spend money, go to countries were same sex union and adoption is legal. But how about the lesbian couples who aren’t well off? They have to face whatever existing Philippine laws and work around it. It’s a good thing that we have lesbian lawyers that can give us suggestions on how we can make the existing laws beneficial for lesbian couples who currently have children and are still planning to have one. Continue reading “Lesbian Parenting in the Philippines”